Gregg Allman, lead singer and keyboard player of the Allman Brothers Band, died Saturday, 5/27, at his home in Savannah, Ga.

“Gregg struggled with many health issues over the past several years,” reads a statement posted on greggallman.com. “During that time, Gregg considered being on the road playing music with his brothers and solo band for his beloved fans, essential medicine for his soul. Playing music lifted him up and kept him going during the toughest of times.”

The news was not unexpected. Allman's years of excess had brought on Hepatitis C; he had a liver transplant in 2010 and a year later suffered an upper-respiratory condition related to the procedure. In August he cancelled a number of scheduled gigs and festival appearances citing “serious health issues.” And in March, a message on his site stated that he wouldn’t be touring in 2017.

Said manager Michael Lehman, “I have lost a dear friend and the world has lost a brilliant pioneer in music. He was a kind and gentle soul with the best laugh I ever heard. His love for his family and bandmates was passionate as was the love he had for his extraordinary fans. Gregg was an incredible partner and an even better friend. We will all miss him.”

Allman is survived by wife Shannon and children Devon, Elijah Blue, Delilah Island Kurtom and Layla Brooklyn Allman, as well as several grandchildren.

Gregg is the fourth member of of the Allman Brothers' original six-piece lineup to pass away. Duane Allman died in 1971and bass player Berry Oakley a year later, both in motorcycle accidents. Drummer Butch Trucks died earlier this year. Drummer Jaimoe and guitarist Dickey Betts are the surviving members.

The band took shape during an impromptu jam in Jacksonville, Fla. “Duane started this band in March of 1969,” Trucks told Bud Scoppa in 2010 for a piece published by U.K. monthly Uncut. “From the very beginning, we were locked onto the knowledge that we were on to something new, intense and exciting. We knew something special was going down from that first, before Gregg even got there. It was the five of us and Reese Wynans, a keyboard player who went on to play with Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble. But he was in the band Dickey and Berry Oakley were in [The Second Coming]. He played organ, and we got into this jam that started out as a little shuffle and lasted about two hours. And I mean, it just went everywhere. We were all playing so far above any level that we had ever played before, and all this communication was flyin’ around. We finally finished, and I’d been through all these changes of chill bumps and tears, just feelings that I’d never felt before. I looked over at Jaimoe and I said, ‘Man, did you get off on that?' He just smiled. Then Duane walked to the door and said, ‘All right, anybody in this room who ain’t gonna play in my band, you’re gonna have to fight your way out the door.'

“Duane was this messianic character,” Butch continued, “and if I hadn’t met him, I’d probably be teaching math at some junior high school. He reached inside me and flicked the switch that turned me on. He just completely changed my whole attitude about music, life, everything.”

Immediately after the nascent band’s collective epiphany, “My brother called me up in L.A. and told me to get my ass back to Jacksonville,” Gregg recalled in a separate interview with Scoppa for the same piece. “He said, ‘I’m tired of bein’ in the studio. I got this black guy named Jaimoe and Butch Trucks to play drums. I got a hell of a bass player, and with him I got a lead guitar player. I’m gonna send you a plane ticket.’ I said, ‘Don’t do that, man. I know you ain’t got the dough. I’ll just hitchhike.’ He didn’t want me to hitch cuz that’s how our dad was killed. But I got a ride all the way.”

Gregg got dropped off, and Duane took him straight to the dilapidated Victorian house where the band was crashing and rehearsing. “They blindfolded me and led me into this room, and there was this brand-spankin’-new 1969 Hammond B3. They said, ‘We’ll see you in about a week. You learn all you can.’ And there was a boombox and all kinds of cassette tapes. After I’d been there a couple days, we went straight down to this makeshift studio and cut ‘Dreams,’ and even then it sounded just like it does today. We’d hit this spontaneous shift and we’d all look around at each other and go, ‘Whoa, where did that come from?’ We just flat knew. So I was in, dig? I belonged. Boy, it felt so good. The next week I wrote ‘Whipping Post,’ ‘Every Hungry Woman,’ ‘Blackhearted Woman’ – I was just spittin’ ‘em out. Most of the first album I sat there and wrote in the third story of that house.”

Butch picked up the narrative: “So we got this band going with those kind of feelings and with absolutely no expectations of making any money. Atlantic Records was telling us, ‘You gotta be kidding. A bunch of white guys just standing there playing – forget it. Get that blond-headed kid out from behind the organ, stick a salami down his pants, let him jump around onstage and maybe you got a chance.’ But we just went, ‘Fuck it.’ We didn’t care, because we were havin’ so much fun playin’ this music. We were going back and using the blues and rhythm & blues, and then trying to get more sophisticated. So we were looking for new horizons, and Jaimoe turned us on to Trane and Miles. I mean, ‘Dreams’ is ‘My Favorite Things.’ ‘In Memory of Elizabeth Reed’ – what rock & roll band was playin’ that kind of stuff? We were also taking a lot of acid and any other mind-altering things we could find, and that opened us up to be able to go for it. We were stretching the limits of what had been done in rock & roll, especially instrumentally. There would be a very loose structure that we would follow, but for the most part it was wide open to do whatever the fuck you wanted to do, and half the time it’d be a train wreck, so we’d shut it down, let it drift around for a while and eventually we’d find something that would click, and it would take off.

“And that weekend in March of ’71 when we recorded At Fillmore East, most of the time it clicked. We were really starting to coalesce; all those influences were being assimilated; our abilities and our knowledge of each other and what we were doing were finally starting to catch up with what we were listening to. That particular weekend was the high point of what all that was. We had lived together, fucked together, we’d done drugs together, we got in trouble together; we all just moved as a unit. And then, when we got onstage to play, that’s what it was all about—and it just happened to all come together that weekend.”

Seven months later, on Oct. 29, Duane crashed his Harley. “When he died, the idea of just walking away crossed my mind,” Gregg admitted. “But I figured, if I don’t keep playin’, I ain’t gonna be worth a shit. It’s hard to believe the chops he had at that age, and how much of a fucking footprint he left.

“Record sales took off right after the funeral, man—they hit the sky”, Gregg continued. “At first I thought Duane really got short-changed.” But the Allmans somehow managed to keep going as a five-piece, with Gregg and Betts sharing the spotlight. Brothers and Sisters, the first album completely recorded without Duane, was the band’s first LP to top the charts.

Meanwhile, Duane’s spirit had spread across the South like a storm off the Gulf of Mexico. Lynyrd Skynyrd, another band out of Jacksonville, wrote “Free Bird” about him, Gary Rossington playing that unforgettable slide solo on his own vintage Les Paul with a Coricidin bottle on his middle finger, just like Duane, in an act of devotion as well as emulation.

The Allmans broke up in 1976 following years of excess; they were sufficiently cleaned up to reunite two years later. During the breakup years, Gregg focused on his solo career and his improbable marriage to Cher, with whom he recorded the abominable 1977 LP Two the Hard Way; the couple gave themselves the cringe-inducing moniker Allman and Woman. Of the seven solo albums released during his lifetime, starting with 1973’s Laid Back, the best of the batch may well be the T Bone-Burnett-produced Low Country Blues, released in 2011. "It sounds like it should be on a scratchy old 78, with the stylus buried down into the record, hitting potholes in the grooves," Gregg said of the LP. "It was really happening, I’ll tell ya. I can’t wait to do another one."

His next and final studio album, Southern Blood, produced by Don Was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala., was initially set to come out in January of this year, but the release was delayed in order for Gregg to put “finishing touches” on it, according to his website. The LP has yet to be rescheduled.

The Allmans were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, their first year of eligibilty.

“As a founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, Gregg Allman helped give birth to Southern rock, blazing a trail for a generation of musicians who were equally influenced by the blues, Southern soul and rock,” said Recording Academy head Neil Portnow. “His earthy vocals graced songs that have become rock standards, including ‘Midnight Rider’ and ‘Whipping Post,’ in addition to his own solo records. The band won a Grammy Award in 1995 for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for ‘Jessica,’ a Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, and their groundbreaking album At Fillmore East was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. We have lost a pioneering force in American music, and our condolences go out to Gregg's family, friends, colleagues and music fans everywhere."

Thank you @GreggAllman... for the inspiration, and for those many holy nights on stage. pic.twitter.com/FV6Qn5zXeE
— Cameron Crowe (@CameronCrowe) May 27, 2017